Last night, I watched Animal, one of the most powerful, beautiful, provocative, and disturbing pieces of performance art I think I've ever seen. The artist happens to be my cousin, Cassie (aka Mama Cass), who's modeled for many of my photographs. She's spent years pushing the boundaries in her work but this piece is truly in a league of its own. Using a distressing recent family event as inspiration, she displays a tenacious fortitude in this that I've not seen in her previous work and can hardly recall seeing anywhere else, actually. This is pure guts, raw and dripping with overwhelming emotion. I am extremely proud of her, not only for the outstanding execution but for the sheer and utter fearlessness exuding from this short video. You rarely see such bravery.

I hate having to give the NSFW warning as a disclaimer to artwork (because art should be above such a warning) but I will anyway. If it isn't immediately obvious from the stills above, there is nudity.

Watch the video here: Animal by Mama Cass
And make sure you have the volume turned up, the sound is as important as the visuals.

Featured Posts

If someone had asked me 10 years ago if I would plan to take self-portraits should I ever get pregnant the answer would have likely been a resounding yes. To document such drastic changes in this vessel I inhabit and be able to add that to my body of work, which was then and still occupied by so many beautiful and various female bodies I've photographed over the years? Well, of course. Ten years later when prompted with that question by several someones, my answer wasn't so certain, maybe even doubtful.

When I became lost in the separation of child and mother, Of myself and the otherWhen I became lost you became foundYou climbed on to the backs of birds andsailed between land and space for milesYour back covered in feathers as black as the sky on a moonless nighteach freckle an understudy for the veiled stars

I met Melissa, this red-lipped, beautifully inked, raven-haired woman less than 6 months ago. One day, nearly two months ago she confessed her love to me for Banksy’s balloon girl. She said she was dying to recreate it in a photograph for someone special to her, but wanted a snowy-filled backdrop. She wanted that vibrant red heart balloon to pop off a clean white setting.

My husband and I recently participated in an Atlas Obscura event to get a peek inside the Wonder View Tower in Genoa, Colorado. I'd actually never heard of this place before a friend sent me a link for the AO tour event only days prior to the meet-up. Needless to say, I was hooked and immediately bought tickets.

"Looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemaker’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world."

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.” ―Diane Setterfield

The trip was of course, wonderful, until the last 30 minutes of the drive home when Serenica's engine began stalling on us whenever we'd drop beneath a certain speed (hoping it's a minor fix!). Fortunately, after stalling out on several occasions and getting it restarted again, she died right inside our RV storage lot gate and wouldn't turn over.